600,000 downloads? No way
The recent claim by Lisa Davis and other "Justice and Unity" candidates that there were 600,000 downloads of sound files from WBAI's audio archives in September is not true. It is another example of their willingness to broadcast statistics that have not relation to reality for the purpose of making themselves look good and winning the election. (Earlier in this campaign, they blithely reported that WBAI had 28,000 members, a claim that no one who knew anything took seriously. Now they have dropped it, in the face of the report from the current election supervisor that we have 15,518 members.)
Anyway - about the downloads - I was curious about it, and after a couple of phone calls, last week I was directed towards the administrative page on the archive website where the web log stats are presented for easy viewing. The numbers are worked up by a free program called "webalizer." The page shows "usage" in terms of hits, files, pages, sites, visits and kilobytes. I was cautioned against over-interpreting it, because the software that works up the stats may not be the greatest, as well as other issues.
It does give a "usage" number of over 600,000 "files" for September. However, this does not necessarily mean downloads of audio files. According to webalizer's definition page, (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/webalizer_help.html)
"Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache."
I interpret this as anything sent from the archives server to another computer - text, a little instruction, a web page, anything.
The webstat page also shows usage in terms of kilobytes. The definition page says; "A KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transfered between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log."
The total Kbyte usage for September is recorded as 510,961,136. This many kilobytes of date were sent from the archives computer to someplace else.
Since the 1 hour sound files on the archives are around 10.4 megabytes (10,400 kilobytes), one can calculate the MAXIMUM number of sound files downloaded by dividing total KByte usage by this number:
510,961,136 / 10,400 = maximum # downloads in September = 49,000
That's about twelve times less than what Lisa Davis has been reporting. The number of ACTUAL downloads of audio files is certainly a good bit lower than that.
On a more functional board, we could ask an expert to come talk to us, so we can get up to speed on the new digital world and learn how to use the archives for the benefit of WBAI. That won't happen here, unfortunately.